Robert Jones - Blood Tide

Miranda turned to at daybreak the next morning. By the time Culdee had slept it off, she’d washed all the dishes, dumped the garbage, polished the kitchen floor. In the head, when he went for his wake-up puke, Culdee found the toilet bowl scrubbed spotless and the towels—fresh ones she must have located in some cupboard unknown to him—neatly folded on the racks. He staggered out onto the veranda and found her holystoning the deck. He hoisted himself into the captain’s chair and stared, frightened, out to sea. Where had his energy gone?

In a week she had the place shipshape. At times he would hear her at her chores—hammering wind-skewed shingles back onto the roof, rehanging storm shutters, whisking great clouds of dust off the bookshelves; he’d hear the gurgle of linseed oil being poured out and the brush slap as spar varnish was applied. She sailed down to Port Albion in the catboat one day—Culdee’s ancient Datsun pickup wouldn’t start—and came back heavily laden with groceries, cleaning materials, hardware, engine parts. Then she fixed the car. But she hadn’t brought anything serious to drink. His fear mounted. There was something awful in her energy, in the strong sheer of her jaw. By God, she was going to reform him!

Panic set his heart to racing. He was shaking again, all over. He slunk out the back door and down to the boathouse. In there, he now remembered, he’d stashed a jug of rum, stowed under tarpaulins. It was still there. He broached it and drank. Two hours later she found him flaked out on the dock and snoring in a halo of fumes.

Stalemate.

EIGHT

And so it went for weeks, for months—Culdee either drunk and voluble or comatose in his captain’s chair. The more he wasted himself, the harder Miranda worked. As if they were on a kind of seesaw, she thought. The lower he sank, the higher she flew. How long could he last? He was killing himself.

“Why do you drink so much?” she asked him one morning. He was at the bright, gabby stage of his lopsided cycle—twenty minutes of rum-fueled pep followed by a day and a half of the dead-eyed sulls.

“Doctor’s orders,” he told her slyly. “If I don’t put away at least a fifth a day, I’ll croak. So will the sawbones.”

“I never heard anything so ridiculous. Who is this so-called doctor?”

“There’s two of them, actually. Mine’s the good doc. If I don’t do what he says, the bad one will kill us both.”

“What are their names? I want to talk to them.”

“You won’t find them in the book,” he said. “But they call themselves Doctor Igor and Doctor Superigor.” He laughed and raised the bottle.

Another time he told her about the hook rats. They were big, ugly things with thick tails. The tails had barbs on them like fishhooks, and when you were asleep, they crawled up on you and stuck their tails in your chest. Then they started chewing into your belly. You couldn’t pull them off. They had scales on them like sharks, razor sharp. Grab hold, and you’d rip your hands to ribbons. They burrowed in fast, and you could feel them tugging your guts, gobbling them like long, soft sausages. Scream, and they’d only chew faster, wagging their tails with joy. But they didn’t like booze. If you could get to a bottle quick enough, all it took was a couple of long, strong slugs to make them scuttle away. For a while at least.

Now and then he could quit for a week or two at a time. Then he was fun to be with. He worked alongside her at the chores, cooking and cleaning and washing the dishes, fixing the pump when it broke, polishing brightwork or painting the hull of the catboat. He told her sea stories about WestPac and his old shipmates, memorable cruises and epic liberties. But he never talked about the scars. She’d noticed them, like bracelets of old coins around his wrists and biceps, shiny and concave, and when he worked shirtless in the sun, she’d see the deep, glossy hole in his shoulder. He had small round scars on his chest and back, and more of the coin things around his ankles. One day she asked.

“Got caught in the shit storm,” he told her. “Shit burns deep.”

They worked on for a while in silence. His face grew hard in the weak California light. They were caulking the catboat, paying cotton and oakum into the seams and pounding it deep with caulking irons. The air was sharp with the reek of creosote. Culdee hammered the oakum viciously with the heel of his fist, muttering to himself. Then he stood up and slammed the iron on the deck.

“Shit burns deep,” he said. “But payback is a motherfucker.”

He stared out to the far southwest.

Miranda was trying, long distance, to collect the insurance on Seamark . If she got it, she thought, they could afford help for Culdee—not a shrink, he wouldn’t stand for that, but maybe a long trip somewhere, a sea voyage, something to put him back in touch with life. The insurance carrier was the Bank of Polynesia, in Papeete, and weeks passed between letters. The bank always wrote in French, in language so arcane and convoluted it took weeks more for Miranda to decipher them. They wanted proof that her vessel had indeed been stolen, not lost through some act of criminal negligence on her part, some fait maladroit that would exonerate them of responsibility.

The few Mexicans she knew in La Paz and Cabo San Lucas pleaded ignorance of the affair, if they answered her letters at all. In despair, she wrote to all her former mates in the wide Pacific—Heinzelmann, Taka, Effredio, the lot of them. No answer. Then the bank, too, fell silent. She began to understand about payback.

Up the coast from the house a creek cut its way through the foothills and spread, behind the dunes, to form a small marsh. Below the marsh was a tidal outlet. Steelhead ran up through the channel to spawn far upstream, and in spring and fall ducks fed in the pickleweed of the brackish water. One day when Culdee was sober he took Miranda up there. They brought along a picnic lunch, a double gun, and two flyrods.

They hiked up through the dusty hills, spooking deer from the manzanita thickets. Valley quail whistled from the old, rotting fence posts, in fields where wild cattle once ran. Then they dropped down a rain-rutted draw to the creek. It was cold in the shadow of the madronas, and the boom of the surf, masked now by hills and dunes, was hollow in the distance. The creek was clear, with deep green holes beneath the fast falls. Culdee pointed out a dark, long shadow finning in one of the pools—a steelhead trout fresh in from the sea—but they continued on down a goat trail beside the creek until they broke out on the edge of the marsh.

“Quiet now,” Culdee said. They left the rods and hamper beside a rock and crept, crouching down into the reeds. Culdee had the gun. They worked along the edge, slowly, in hip boots. The water was cold. Ahead Miranda could hear the throaty chuckling of ducks and see the circles of their dabbing. Then the ducks got up off the water with a sudden splashing racket, their green heads brilliant in the light, and Culdee shot twice. Two of them folded and fell. He turned and smiled. He’d shaved and brushed his teeth that morning, and for a moment, looked almost boyish.

Later he taught her to shoot at the birds that came swinging in over the floating bodies of the ducks he’d killed. He coached her in mounting the gun solidly—keeping both eyes open, her left hand far out along the barrels, then swinging smooth and fast and steady along through the swift, low shape of the bird until she saw, down the plane of the barrels, the black, glittering eye. That was the time to hit the trigger. She killed the third bird she shot at—a pintail, it turned out. And the fourth as well. That was enough ducks for one day.